The Martians: Testing Curiosity's Parachute - Part 4

February 19, 2010

This episode (part 4 of a 4 part series) shows Mars team members having a little fun on April 1, 2010 (April Fool's) at the end of an exhausting parachute test campaign. The team had just completed testing the parachute for the next Mars rover, Curiosity. Curiosity used a similar parachute to successfully land on Mars in August 2012.

TRANSCRIPT

(Doug Adams) 'Let's take a break. It's gonna be a while before they do this.'

(Tom Rivellini) 'Let's hurry up and wait.'

(Doug Adams) 'Hurry up and wait. (laughter) Faster! Now sit down.'

(Tom Rivellini) It was a nerve-wracking test, because of all the failures we'd had previously,

the difficulties we had had, some of the mysterious things that we'd seen during these tests.

We really didn't have any more backups in terms of ideas of how to fix this, and it was kind of our last hurrah here -- our last chance to get it right.So there was a lot riding on these tests.(dramatic music)

I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that it was April 1st.

So I was like, 'Oh man, we can't just let a good April Fool's Day go by without doing something.

So I went to Al Witkowski, and I said, 'Al, how do you feel about having some fun at Doug's expense?'

And so he was up for it. And that's when Pat, the test director, said,

'Hey, why don't we just tell him that we didn't get any data?'

And that was beautiful, because the data is everything on this test.

If you run the test and you don't get any data, you might as well not have run the test.

And you can't go back and redo it, because once you've unpacked the parachute, you can't go back and repack it without damaging it.

(playful jazz music)

‘I don't know.' 'What happened?'

(Thom Wynne) 'I heard the mortar, I punched the button, and it was like -- boom -- it was gone.'

(Tom Rivellini) I got the photographers in on it too, to tell Doug for some reason the cameras went out.

(Doug Adams) 'The battery died. No money shot. The big picture shot is gone.' (music)'What is up with that?! What, did E.T. land during this test or something?' (Thom Wynne) 'The D3s had the lens caps on them.'

(Doug Adams) 'What's up with this test?'

(Thom Wynne) 'You know, I uh... (stammers) They did the whole GG thing, and I was -- I had no idea, so...'

(Thom Wynne) I hoped that he wouldn't really believe that I'd be that incompetent as to leave the lens caps on